Super-memory
If we sometimes despair of having a poor memory, it would also be a serious impediment to remember everything. Our minds would be so clogged as to leave little room for much else. A condition known as ‘savant syndrome’ can result in prodigious powers of memory, but deficiencies in other aspects of intelligence. One extraordinary example is Kim Peek, the inspiration for the movie Rain Man. He died, aged 58, in 2009. Known to his friends as ‘Kim-puter’, he began memorising books at the age of 18 months. By his mid-fifties he had memorised 9000 books. He had a vast storehouse of knowledge in history, sports, movies, space programmes, literature and Shakespeare, among other things. He had an extensive knowledge of classical music, and in middle life had even begun to play it. Like other savants, he could tell you at once the day of the week for any given date, a feat known to depend on massive memory.
Yet on a standard test of intelligence, Peek scored only 87 (the population average is 100). He had an unusual sidelong gait, could not button his clothes, and could not handle the chores of daily life. He also had difficulty with abstract ideas. What this profile suggests is that a large and detailed memory can work to the disadvantage of other mental skills, and a memory that is too particular can impair ability to see relations and form abstractions. Too many trees, and it’s hard to see the wood.
Another remarkable savant is Daniel Tammet, famous for having learned to speak Icelandic in a week, a feat he accomplished for a TV documentary. In March 2004, he recited the mathematical constant pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) to 22,514 decimal places. For this, he depended on seeing numbers in his mind’s eye as ‘complex, multidimensional, coloured, and textured shapes’. This ability to associate entities in one sensory domain with qualities in another is known as ‘synaesthesia’. Tammet, then, was able to see the digits of pi roll by as a numerical panorama, ‘the beauty of which both fascinated and enchanted me’. He also found poetry in his synaesthetic vision. A verse from a poem he wrote based on a visit to Iceland goes like this:
And in the towns and cities
I watched people talking among themselves
Stitching their breath
With soft and coloured words.
A rather different case was Solomon Shereshevskii, also known in the literature as ‘S’, whose prodigious feats of memory were described by the great Russian neuropsychologist Aleksandr Romanov Luria in his 1968 book The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevskii’s memory capacity was seemingly without limit, and he remembered trivial things for extremely long periods of time. He could accurately recall lists of words that Luria had presented sixteen years earlier. His memory was mainly visual, and when given words or numbers to remember he could transform them mentally, either by arranging them in spatial patterns, or using the ‘method of loci’ whereby he would imagine them in familiar locations and later ‘play them back’ by visiting those locations in his mind.
The particularity of his memory was actually an impediment, because it prevented him from forming general concepts. He couldn’t make sense of novels, since he would imagine scenes in precise detail, only to find his images contradicted at later stages. Like the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who opened this chapter, and Daniel Tammet, he too was a synaesthete, so that spoken words were accompanied by visual sensations, such as ‘puffs’ or ‘splashes’, and a tone at precisely 30 cycles per second and 100 decibels gave rise to ‘a strip 12–15 cm in width the color of old tarnished silver’.
He should be so lucky, you might think—not all of us can conjure images of old tarnished silver. But in fact his extraordinary memory and intrusive visual imagery were serious impediments to a normal life. Luria quotes an example related to him by Shereshevskii:
One time I went to buy some ice cream . . . I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. ‘Fruit ice cream,’ she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way.
The method of loci, though, need not be allied with synaesthesia, and is a useful technique that anyone can learn, although probably not to anything like the degree achieved by Shereshevskii. It is in fact a practical application of mind-wandering, albeit in a controlled form. According to Cicero, it was discovered by a Greek poet named Simonides, who was entertaining a group of wealthy noblemen at a banquet, when he was called outside by two mysterious figures, who turned out to be messengers from the Olympian gods Castor and Pollux. As soon as he left, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing all those inside. The bodies were too mangled to be identified, until Simonides came forward and indicated where each had been sitting, and was then able to name each in turn. On the basis of this story, Greek and Roman orators were said to use the method of loci to memorise their speeches.
The method of loci was adapted by Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary working in China. In 1596, he wrote a book called Treatise on Mnemonic Arts, setting out a technique to enable Chinese men to retain the vast knowledge they needed to pass the civil service examinations. It was based on an imagined ‘memory palace’, made up of a reception hall and many rooms with vivid images, depicting such emotional scenes as war or religious events. The idea was to associate items to be remembered with these images, often in emotional or outrageous combinations, so that later a mental wander through the palace would reveal what was to be remembered.
Even today, the method of loci seems to be the mnemonic of choice for the world’s top memorisers. One who uses it is Lu Chao, a Chinese businessman who holds the Guinness record for reciting the decimal places of the constant pi. In 2006, he recited pi to 67,890 decimal places, before making an error on the 67,891st, tripling the earlier record set by Tammet. An even more striking example, though, is a young engineering student, perhaps not surprisingly (but maybe jokingly) referred to in the literature as ‘PI’. He recited pi to more than 216 decimal places. He is said to have made ‘under 24 errors’, which may sound a lot, but on average is only one error per 212 digits. Just why he made occasional errors is not stated, but may have to do with some fuzziness in the imagined locations. Shereshevskii occasionally failed to remember an item because he had mentally placed it in a rather dark location, but this could sometimes be corrected when he imagined turning a street light on.
These last cases, unlike Shereshevskii, seem otherwise normal, although PI has a rather poor memory for events and for neutral faces—he seems better on faces showing emotion. Such cases aside, it may be that techniques like the method of loci have become largely irrelevant. You can download pi to whatever precision you need from your iPad. And who needs it to 216 decimal places?
False memories
I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
—Mark Twain
Our memories are not only incomplete, they are also often inaccurate, and we sometimes ‘remember’ things that didn’t actually happen. The American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneer in the study of false memories, vividly recalls her own mother’s death. She was fourteen years old, and visiting her aunt and uncle. She remembers the fateful day as bright and sunny, and recalls the sight and smell of cool pine trees, the taste of iced tea. She sees her mother in her nightgown, floating face down, drowned in a swimming pool. She cries out in terror, screams, sees police cars with lights flashing, and watches her mother’s body being carried out on a stretcher. But the memory is false. She was in fact asleep when the body was found, not by her but by her aunt Pearl.
I have a strong memory of a famous rugby match in 1981 when New Zealand played South Africa in Auckland, amid protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Two demonstrators in a light plane dropped flour bombs on the players, one of which struck and felled the All Black Murray Mexted—an event that I thought might explain the malapropisms that found their way into Mexted’s vocabulary
when he later became a rugby commentator. Alas for my theory, and for my memory, I later discovered that it was not Mexted whom the flour bomb hit. It was Gary Knight, whose vocabulary, as far as I know, is fine.
False memories are easily implanted. People often give detailed answers when asked to describe being lost in a mall, or being taken for a ride in a hot-air balloon, or being nearly drowned and rescued by a lifeguard, even though these events never actually happened to them. In another example described by Loftus, people were shown a fake ad extolling a visit to Disneyland which included mention of Bugs Bunny. About a third of them claimed they had themselves visited Disneyland and shaken hands with Bugs Bunny. They could see it in their mind’s eye. Bugs Bunny, though, is the creation of Warner Brothers and does not feature in the property of The Walt Disney Co. The memory was false.
Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist, clearly recalled an incident when he was four years old. His nurse was pushing him in a pram along the Champs Élysées in Paris, when a man tried to kidnap him. He was strapped in, and the nurse tried to stand between him and the kidnapper. In the scuffle, she was scratched on her face, and Piaget claimed he could still see the scratches in his mind’s eye. When he was fifteen, though, his nurse wrote to him to say she had made up the whole story.
In the late nineteenth century, false memories were known as ‘paramnesias’, and it was known that they could be induced through hypnosis. An especially horrific example is described by the hypnotherapist Hippolyte Bernheim, who tells how he suggested to a patient that she had watched through a keyhole an old man raping a little girl, who struggled, was bleeding, and was then gagged. His suggestion ended: ‘When you wake up you will think no more about it. I have not told the story to you; it is not a dream; it is not a vision I have given you during your hypnotic sleep; it is truth itself.’ Three days later, Bernheim asked a distinguished lawyer friend to question the patient. The patient repeated the events in detail as suggested to her, and even when encouraged to doubt them she insisted on their truth ‘with immovable conviction’. Needless to say, such an experiment would be unthinkable today.
The ease with which memories can be implanted gave rise to social mayhem in the 1980s and 1990s when many therapists adopted the view that psychological problems in adulthood could be traced to sexual abuse during childhood. Because of their traumatic nature, it was argued, such memories were repressed, and the main purpose of therapy was to recover these memories, so that patients could then face the real causes of their problems and deal with them—presumably with the therapist’s help. The most extreme expression of this view was a book by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis entitled The Courage to Heal, which was first published in 1988 but has since gone through several editions. Bass and Davis, who had no formal training in psychology or psychiatry, were nevertheless bold enough to tell their readers:
If you don’t remember your abuse, you are not alone. Many women don’t have memories, and some never get memories. This doesn’t mean they weren’t abused.
Elsewhere in the book, Bass and Davis write: ‘If you think you were abused, and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.’ This statement commits the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. It is, of course, true that childhood abuse can cause later symptoms of psychological distress, but this does not mean that psychological stress must have resulted from childhood abuse. Murder results in death, but this doesn’t mean that death is always due to murder. Unfortunately, widespread acceptance of Bass and Davis’s edict too often led to aggressive therapy designed to help distressed people recover the memories of the abuse that led to their distress, when no such abuse had in fact occurred.
The problem was that therapists could easily and unwittingly implant false memories. Of course some people who suffer from psychological problems have indeed been abused sexually, or in other ways. But the notion that all or even most psychological problems result from abuse is almost certainly wrong, and innocent people were accused of abuses that they had not committed. This sorry era led to a good deal of research into the nature and fragility of memory, and a well-trained therapist should now be alert to the danger of implanting false memories, and of assuming abuse where other causes of mental distress are possible, and often more likely.
Memory is a fickle witness anyway, and decisions based on memory, whether in the courtroom or the therapist’s office, are bound to lead to error. Sometimes the innocent are found guilty, and sometimes the guilty are declared innocent. The question then becomes one of determining the cost of a false decision. Which is the more costly: failing to detect a true criminal or true child abuser, or convicting innocent people of crimes or abuses they didn’t commit? Based initially on Roman law, modern constitutions assert the right of those convicted to be deemed innocent until proven guilty. In the eyes of the law, at least, it is better to let at least some criminals walk free than to imprison innocent citizens. But often it is that arch-deceiver, memory, that is the true villain.
So why is memory so bad? It was clearly not designed by nature to be a faithful record of the past. Rather, it supplies us with information—some true, some false, and always incomplete—that we use to construct stories. ‘Memory is a poet, not an historian’, the American poet Marie Howe once said. We may well be what we remember, at least in part, but our memories, like clothes, can be selected and modified to create what we want to be, rather than what we actually are. Hillary Clinton, as the United States First Lady in 1996, told of visiting Bosnia, heroically risking her life as she disembarked from the plane and ran for cover under sniper fire. In fact, her landing was peaceful, and she was met by a smiling child, whom she kissed. Of course, she may have made up the story to seem heroic, but even if so, some commentators suggest that she actually came to believe her own account.
Ronald Reagan, too, recalled acts of heroism during World War II that seemed to derive from old movies. He even gave the impression he had been at the Normandy landings and at the liberation of Nazi death camps. Later, though, he came to accept that some of his reported adventures were not real, telling one of his associates: ‘Maybe I had seen too many war movies, the heroics of which I sometimes confused with real life.’
Both Clinton and Reagan may have been lying, but it is more charitable to suggest that they were victims of self-deception. According to William von Hippel and Robert Trivers, the capacity for self-deception evolved because it reduces the chance of being found out. Lies told deliberately can often be detected, especially if the liar is well known to his or her audience—lie detectors don’t work very well because they are not tuned to idiosyncrasies of the liar. It’s easier to tell if your friend is lying, because of giveaway hesitations or unusual mannerisms, than to avoid being hoodwinked by a plausible stranger. But if the teller of false information believes that information to be true, it is then told with the equanimity of revealing the truth, and both the teller and the audience are deceived. People may come to really believe that falsely remembered events actually happened, the more they create vivid images of those events in their minds.
In any case, life might indeed be drab if all memories were accurate, and accurately told. The late Ulric Neisser, one of the giants of cognitive psychology, wrote: ‘Remembering is not like playing back a tape or looking at a picture; it is more like telling a story.’ And the story that it tells is as often directed to the future as to the past, as I’ll explain in the next chapter.
3.
ON TIME
…
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future . . .
—T. S. Eliot, from Four Quartets
Remembering is mind-wandering into the past. We can also wander into the future, imagining what might happen tomorrow, or next Christmas, or when the Antarctic ice melts. The evidence shows, in fact, that people spend more time thinking about the future than about the past. Nevertheless, there is a natural continuity between future and past, as time glides relentlessly from
one to the other. What we’re about to do quickly becomes what we have done—assuming we actually do it. Sometimes we don’t, and when that happens we’re inclined to say: ‘Well, I forgot.’ Even forgetting, it seems, can apply to the future as to the past.
Our ability to travel mentally into past and future, and the smooth continuity between them, underlies our sense of time itself. Although we can mentally travel in either direction, our physical lives are rooted to the present while time flows by. Downstream lies that singular event we all mercifully forget—or were incapable of remembering—called birth, while the lines of Isaac Watts’ hymn ‘Our God, Our Help in Ages Past’ remind us of what lies upstream:
Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
But although our actual lives are imprisoned between birth and death, we can mentally travel beyond both. History can be brought alive through past records and texts, or the discovery of ancient artefacts, and embellished in historical novels or movies. Futuristic scenarios can tell of brave new worlds, or impending disaster. Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future America where books are forbidden, and houses containing books are ordered to be burned. This dire outlook doesn’t seem to have affected sales, although Bradbury himself is reported to have said: ‘I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.’
Once we humans discovered the concept of time, we could then ask how far it could be stretched. Physicists tell us that a big bang 13.77 billion years ago started it all, and 7.5 billion years in the future the sun will grow so large it will gobble up the earth. These cataclysmic events, I think, take us well beyond the imaginable—well outside the limits of mental time travel, although I suppose we might well entertain the possibility of moving to somewhere in space where there is a less voracious sun. Dream on.
The Wandering Mind Page 3